Native American Minnesota

On April 3, I attended an event hosted at the Minneapolis American Indian Center (MAIC) titled, Close the Gap: End Disparities in the American Indian Community. There were speakers, a panel discussion, and a showing of one of the segments of Close the Gap, a documentary film series by the Minnesota Channel  of Twin Cities Public Television (TP).

Featured presenters:

• Elaine Salinas, President, Migizi Communications
• Jim Clairmont, spiritual leader, educator, elder
• Sandy Vargas, President, Minneapolis Foundation
• Justin Huenemann, President and CEO, Native American Community Development
• Bill Ziegler, President and CEO, Little Earth of United Tribes
• Lee Antell, President and CEO, American Indian OIC
• Noya Woodrich, Executive Director, Division of Indian Work, Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches
• LeMoine LaPoint, Healthy Nations Director, Minneapolis American Indian Center (MAIC)

See the album of photos or this slideshow:

It was at our initial committee meeting that first I heard about the spiritual significance of Coldwater Spring/Camp Coldwater (adjacent to Ft. Snelling) to native Minnesotans.

I read about the area on the Friends of Coldwater web site and on historian Bruce White’s web page on Camp Coldwater: The Birthplace of Minnesota and then in mid-Feb, my son Graham and I paid a visit to the site.

(Click the screenshot of a zoomed-in Google map on the left.)

I was surprised to see how dilapidated the area is, especially the buildings for the Bureau of Mines Twin Cities Research Center which has been closed since 1995. That web page says:

The purpose of the project is to consider alternatives and potential impacts of alternative future uses of this federal property on the natural, historic and cultural resources. The former Research Center is located within two historic designations: the Fort Snelling National Historic Landmark, the Fort Snelling National Register Historic District.

The site includes the Camp Coldwater Spring and the Springhouse and pond. The buildings have been determined eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

I noticed that the Coldwater web sites didn’t have any current large/high-res photos of Coldwater Spring and the area around it, so I took a couple dozen.  See this album of 18 Coldwater Spring photos or this slideshow.

Back in February, my wife Robbie and I did the candlelight walk at Fort Snelling State Park under a bright moon. I was thrilled to see that park’s visitor center, AKA the Thomas C. Savage Interpretive Center, has a fabulous display on the Dakota Conflict Concentration Camp, the prison camp where hundreds of Mdewakanton Dakota were imprisoned at Ft. Snelling during the winter following the 1862 Dakota War.

Click the photo thumbnails to enlarge. The photos of displays with descriptive text pop up to versions large enough to read.

On March 2, I attended a presentation at Fort Snelling State Park by historian Bruce White about his new book "We Are at Home: Pictures of the Ojibwe People," published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

This is the audio of the first 11 minutes of Bruce’s presentation in which he discusses the importance of the Coldwater Spring area near Fort Snelling to both the Dakota and Ojibewe.

Below is the press release on Bruce’s book.

 Bruce White, author of "We Are at Home: Pictures of the Ojibwe People," published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, will be at Fort Snelling State Park on March 2 at 1 p.m., to speak about his book and about the frequent visits by Ojibwe people to the area of Fort Snelling in the 19th century. Copies of "We Are at Home: Pictures of the Ojibwe People" will be available for sale at the program, and Mr. White will autograph copies for those who have them.

Beginning in the 1850s Ojibwe people in Minnesota were photographed by many different kinds of photographers who were interested in recording them, mostly for an audience of non-Indians. These photographs emphasized the exotic, stereotypical look of the Ojibwe, their chiefs, their birch-bark houses and canoes, sometimes recorded with the idea that the Ojibwe were disappearing from the landscape. As time went on, however, Ojibwe people began to obtain photos for their own purposes, recording communities, family members, and relationships.

In the process they created a much richer record of people who have not disappeared but who survived and who thrive today. The audio-visual presentation will be based on the book, "We Are at Home: Pictures of the Ojibwe people," a book published in 2007 by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, which took the author over twenty years to research and write. The author will also discuss the many delegations Ojibwe people in the 19th century to the Fort Snelling area, where they traded with the local Dakota, shared ceremonies, and took part in U.S.-government sponsored diplomacy at the fort and at Coldwater Spring.

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In the Feb. 1 StarTribune: Land purchase saves a slice of state’s past: Pilot Knob now has 25 acres of land preserved as a permanent natural resource.

Eighteen acres of Pilot Knob, a cherished tract of Minnesota history that was under threat of townhouse development just a few years ago, will be preserved as open space in a deal completed Thursday.

The nonprofit Trust for Public Land conveyed the land to the city of Mendota Heights, which will manage that tract and 8 1/2 acres purchased two years ago. The land will be returned to its natural state with prairie grass and oak trees for use as a passive-use park, said Bob McGillivray, the TPL’s senior project manager.

Riverboat pilots hauling supplies to nearby Fort Snelling gave Pilot Knob its name. The Mdewakanton and Wakpehkute Dakota tribes named it Oheyawahi, meaning "the hill much visited," and consider the land sacred ground because they buried their dead there. It’s also where they signed the Treaty of 1851 that ceded 35 million acres of Dakota land to the U.S. government.

I took some photos of Pilot Knob on Feb. 2. Click thumbnails to enlarge.

The sign says that "the City of Mendota Heights is undertaking a 9 year plan to restore the native prairie and oak savannah that once covered this site."

It also mentions the Pilot Knob Preservation Association as a major partner in protecting the site. The don’t have anything on their home page but they do have a page titled the Oheyawahi/Pilot Knob Burial Register, last updated on Feb. 17, 2004.

Back in mid-January, I met with some of the people involved with the Minnesota Sesquicentennial project at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. We discussed what could be done during the Minnesota Sesquicentennial to address how the Native American population was treated during the years before and after statehood in 1858.

Standing, L to R (click to enlarge): Matthew Brandt, VP, Minnesota Humanities Center; Stephen Feinstein, ED, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Feinstein died from an aortic aneuryism a month later); Sheldon Wolfchild, former chair, Lower Sioux Indian Community. Sitting, L to R: Lou Ann Matossian, Program Director, Cafesjian Family Foundation; Megan Jung, Grants Coordinator, Minnesota Sesquicentennial; Jane Leonard, Executive Director, Minnesota Sesquicentennial.

I’ve been a colleague of Jane Leonard’s for many years, collaborating on a variety of civic-oriented online projects. When she learned I was very interested in how the Minnesota’s Sesquicentennial was going to involve Minnesota Native Americans and that I’d been researching my own Dakota roots the past few years, she invited me to the meeting. She subsequently accepted my proposal to host this blog (now titled Native American Minnesota: A journey of learning and understanding) and lead the effort to explore what kind of partnering could be done with Minnesota Indian Tribes to increase public awareness of what happened 150 years ago at the dawn of Minnesota’s statehood.

My Dakota roots? My great great grandparents were Hypolite Dupuis and Angelique Renville. Angelique Renville was the daughter of Joseph Renville and Mary Little Crow, a full-blooded Dakota. Joseph Renville’s mother, Miniyuhe, was a member of Little Crow’s (Taoyateduta) Santee Dakota village of Kaposia. It’s not clear if she was the daughter of a Dakota chief named Big Thunder or a daughter of the first of three leaders named Little Crow (not, however, the noteworthy ‘third’ Little Crow, Taoyateduta).